Today we are talking about helping English Teachers save time scoring papers. It’s crazy and it is simple, and we are going to learn a lot. The aim is a better result, that means that the students are better writers and the teacher spends less time scoring their papers. Let me say that again…The aim is to have better student writers and for the teacher to spend less time scoring the papers, that is what we are after. So, I am going to give you some steps for this.
First, make a list of the writing traits that will be taught. In younger grades there are six, that is the most common. As they go through the grades the highest that I have seen is 12, I am sure there are more, but make a list of the writing traits that will be taught and you want students to utilize by the end of the school year.
Here is the hard one, replace your matrix rubrics, which are currently out of date, with more accurate dichotomous rubrics. We have a blank one on our website free to download with it you can customize to your evaluation needs. You would be able to make a rubric for each of the traits that you expect the kids to know by the end of the school year. Check out our ‘Blank Graphs’ tab at the top of our website and then scroll to find “Dichotomous Rubrics”.
Here is the story behind them: I was visiting Jeff Burgart’s school science class and he was teaching kids the dichotomous key, which is common in science classes. He picked up a leaf, “Huh, I wonder what tree this comes from?” To find out he had the students work through the Dichotomous Key, answering yes and no questions until they landed on the name of the tree. You are fishing, you pull a fish out, are you able to keep this one? What kind of fish is it? You answer yes and no questions about that fish and you’ll find what kind of fish that it is. It is used for rocks, minerals, and many other living things too. It’s been used for years in science and is an ideal and accurate rubric. Now Jeff had a habit when kids wrote reports for the lab, when they handed in their paper and they were using a matrix rubric, they were to estimate what rubric score that Jeff was going to give them. They were about 20% accurate on what their final rubric score was going to be. When he changed to the dichotomous rubric for lab reports, they improved to being about 80 - 85% accurate, they knew exactly what the answer was going to be because they could follow the yes and no questions.
The dichotomous rubric saves teachers time first of all, because students have a much better idea of what is expected. They get it! Secondly, the teacher is teaching one trait at a time, and assessing one trait at a time in the students’ written documents. Evaluating one trait is just in the beginning, later we will be training and assessing multiple traits, but first it is just one.
There are two key points in this new approach to grading written papers:
For this approach we are talking about later on in the year, when the students have had a lot of instruction and practice in writing. So, all the papers would be handed in. Lets say you are using only the six traits of writing, and you are in the second half of the school year. The students write their papers and once all papers have been turned in, a student comes to the front of the room with a six-sided die, rolls it against the wall some place. It bounces back, the kids are all gathered around to look at it, and whatever number comes up on the die - that is the ONLY trait that the teacher scores on that assignment. Just ONE.
Teachers report that they spend half as much time scoring papers as before when they are only looking for one trait on the paper instead of everything. But then, here is the surprising part, they report better writing! Even in the AP Courses, which have a very accurate measurement of writing, they report better writing from students when implementing this method of evaluation. It’s what we talked about at the beginning, how do we get better writing from our students and save our teachers time. We have talked about the first part, saving teachers time.
Here is why it is not working the way that we do it now… When you read a stack of papers from all the students, looking at all six traits at once, by the time that you finish (in fact long before you finish) scoring the papers on the weekend, your head has turned to mush. It’s too much to keep track of, what do they need to improve on? But, when teachers score a stack of student papers for only one trait, the next day their instruction is extremely precise. This is because the teachers know exactly what the students need to know to become better writers. That’s why we get better results, because the teaching is precise when the teacher knows exactly what it is that the students need.
The evaluation of education really needs to be two-fold for everything that we do, better results is half of the question, do we get better results? The other half is, did the new initiative save time? By the way, time is not saved immediately, it does take time to create dichotomous rubrics, share them with each other, learn from each other, and ask the kids if it makes sense. You can adjust them because you are in charge of it! But time is saved over the course of the school year when you assess one trait at a time and use the dichotomous rubrics.
Now, how do students know that their writing is improving? How do they know that they are getting better? How do teachers know that the whole class is improving? And then, how do we celebrate this improvement? We are going to look at this…
First thing is, on the website, when you click on Dichotomous Rubrics, you will see a blank Student Run Chart for the Dichotomous Rubric. At the bottom, there is a space, this is for you to write in the trait that is being assessed. Rather, for the students to write in the trait, because each student has their own, and then they graph up their score. If they got three on the rubric, then they would color up to the three. Each time they do this, it could be the same trait, it could be a new trait, we don’t know. As time passes they will have recorded all through the school year each time the trait has been assessed. They will know with that trait if they are getting better and they will know overall if they are improving as a writer.
But, teachers want to know if the class is writing better, how do they know that? It is very simple…The Dichotomous Rubric Class Run Chart. With this graph, you simply add up the total. When the teachers are scoring the papers and the student has four, then you make a tally mark by the four and you go onto the next one, the next paper you pick up is a five, then you make a tally mark next to the five, the next one is a two, you put a tally mark next to the two. Once all tallies have been collected, give the tally marks to one of the students and they will add up the total to see how many rubric points they got as a whole class. They graph it on the Class Run Chart, write down the trait below, fill in the points and then the whole class will know how they did.
“Hmmm, our graph dipped, I wonder why?”
“Oh, well that trait is the hardest one, we are having a more difficult time with that than any of the others.”
“Oh, it’s way up, that was an easy trait.”
By the way, ‘conventions’ is going to be one of the traits. Students don't like it when that is rolled on the die, because they spend a lot of time thinking about their writing and all the teacher is going to score is their conventions. The teacher can say “I didn’t roll the die, you kids rolled it and that is what came up.”
These charts are for everyone to see and they are posted on the wall. Just like a score board at an athletic event, the total for the class chart is all graphed. And when the students are better than ever before… celebrate! Don’t give them donuts, don’t give them cookies, don’t give them popcorn or ice cream - please, do something fun to celebrate, they like it. They like it when the teachers and the students can celebrate and have fun together, instead of the students celebrating by themselves that the exam is over. It is the teachers and students celebrating together, celebrating that the whole class did better than ever before on their writing.
Students can learn far more than we ever expected, we know that! The question is, what do we do? I hate to hear how much time that teachers are spending on the weekends scoring papers, it’s not a good use of your time. Now, I understand that when it gets time for the nine week report card, you are probably going to spend time looking at all the traits on one paper for the students, but not each time. No, you are not going to do that except once a quarter, you are going to look at all the traits at the same time. Remember, there is setup time, creating the dichotomous rubrics, going on the website and printing out the blank graphs, but the aim is, better results in less teacher time and less classroom time.
To remind you, the Dichotomous Rubrics discussed during today’s presentation are available to download on our website CrazySimpleEducation.com, scroll down just a little bit and there under ‘Blank Graphs’ is the Dichotomous Rubrics folder for the 3 graphs we have.
